I’ve always been struck by Tracy Flick, from the 1999 film Election. Portrayed by a ferociously perky, blonde-bobbed Reese Witherspoon, Flick is the paradigmatic striver – she will stop at nothing to be successful. She is a walking résumé-padding exercise, a living, breathing college application. She has to have the very best grades, the extracurriculars and, as the title suggests, the student-body presidency. She eventually ends up at Georgetown.
It was never really clear to me why I loved Flick so much – and not just loved, but really related to her. I was not a striver myself. I was crushed when I didn’t end up at Harvard, a school I had made no effort whatsoever to get in to. I hadn’t so much as submitted an application. I hadn’t even written a fantasy application where I drummed up my own accomplishments. I mean, I did nothing. In fact, I didn’t even finish high school, so why I thought I was going to end up at the best university in the country as though it was Hogwarts and I was secretly a wizard-in-waiting is completely opaque to me.
He’s automating the very thing I always hated most and, I have to say, I respect it
I was also an unrepentant hater of people who actually tried, who strived, who did everything they needed to do to get in to a good college and eventually get a good job. I resented them utterly; they were a huge source of my teen angst. There wasn’t a shred of real intellectual curiosity in them, I decided. I found it insulting that someone who got good grades was considered an intellectual. If anything, I began to suspect that doing well in the system was evidence of the opposite. It had to be. You were good at tests, good at school, good at brown-nosing. You weren’t an intellectual. (It might also help to know that I attended a K-12 school where kids knew from as young as eight that they were destined to work at McKinsey or Bain – or, should they answer a nobler calling, attend medical school. I was being oppositional and annoying, yes, but the rebellion was grounded in something at least a little bit defensible.)
As much as I refused to accept that “these kids are smart” – I still don’t think they were, though now many of them are rich, needless to say, richer than I am – I have to give them credit. They had work ethics. Truly, these assholes were up before the crack of dawn to train for whatever obscure sport they believed would get them into a good college. Their evenings were a rotation of string-instrument lessons, speech and debate practice, studying and having sex at house parties. Whatever criticism I wanted to level at them for not knowing who Fellini was or for reading Twilight while I read Houellebecq – or whatever, I don’t really remember, but it was something like that (can you tell I was insufferable?) – they worked for their seats at Harvard, Yale and Stanford. They were the American Dream. Looking back on the whole thing now, I can admit, the elite should be full of people like them.
I hadn’t thought of these people in a long while until I received the following email: “I hope this email finds you well! My name is REDACTED and I am a junior in high school, a passionate writer, and the Founder & CEO of REDACTED – a stealth-mode startup leveraging AI to disrupt the REDACTED space. As a fellow builder in the digital space, your blog, Default Wisdom, has truly resonated with me…”
Apparently it hadn’t resonated enough for him to know it’s called Default Blog. The message went on and on. I mean, it’s genius.
My immediate reaction was: there’s no way in hell this kid reads my blog. Name faux pas aside, why would he read it? My blog, if you, dear Spectator reader, are unfamiliar with it, is mostly me writing in a typo-filled internet pidgin about my life. Perhaps he really does read it; perhaps the life and times of a 30-something-year-old mother of three in Chicagoland really does “resonate” with his 16-year-old self.
But what I imagine actually happened is that – assuming this is a real kid and not a sophisticated scam – he set up an AI agent (an AI that will carry out tasks on his behalf) to find writers who might cover him and his project, then email them. He is using ChatGPT as his own PR team. He’s automating his striving – or at least some part of it. One wonders how far an enterprising high schooler could take this. Emails to would-be mentors or obliging bloggers, like the one above, are a given. Have the machine research the recipients, send emails for you, follow up. He’s automating the very thing I always hated most and, I have to say, I respect it. It’s subversive. And he’s still taking initiative, showing off his ingenuity, demonstrating fluency in new technology – all perfectly good things to admire in a person. The ambition still belongs to him, too.
In my day, the best and the brightest were making $15,000 in a week on Apple’s App Store. Today’s youngsters can be juggling multiple one-man start-ups – agents building the company, staffing the company, finding venture capitalists to fund the company. They could go into one of those agent-run message boards and get other AI agents to be their customers. A striver can make the cost of his tuition three times over before graduating, and because he’s so impressive, invest that money. He was going to get a full ride on merit anyway.
And why stop there? Once at college he can launch an accelerator for other one-man start-ups and take 7 percent equity for a small investment raised by his AI-staffed venture capital firm. He can start a podcast to share what he’s learned and use AI podcast clippers to post a torrent of 30-second videos of him to Instagram and TikTok and make sure he dominates the charts. After he maxes that out, maybe he can establish a nonprofit to teach disadvantaged iPad babies how to launch startups – no, accelerators – of their own. He can found a research institute, staff it with AI and give himself a lifetime achievement award. He can expand the research institute into his own research university, staffed entirely by AI versions of himself. Have the computer science department work on improving the faculty. Through perfecting the faculty – itself a feat of self-optimization – he can finally unlock recursive self-improvement: an AI that builds a smarter successor, which builds an even smarter successor, which builds, in turn, an even smarter successor still, until he makes himself and every other striver obsolete.
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